How to Use Styles and the Navigation Pane in Word

In Word Basics you made headings by clicking Heading 1 in the Styles gallery. That one click does much more than make text big and blue. It tells Word "this is a heading", and Word builds a lot on top of that: the Navigation Pane, a table of contents, PDF bookmarks and screen reader navigation.

In this tutorial you will clean up the club's 12-page Tutoring Handbook, where volunteers made headings by hand with bold and bigger fonts. You will turn them into real heading styles, change how every heading looks in one step, and reorganize chapters by dragging them in the Navigation Pane.

Styles vs. direct formatting

There are two ways to make text look a certain way. Direct formatting is what you apply by hand: select text, click Bold, pick 16 pt, choose a color. A style is a named set of formatting (font, size, color, spacing, indents and more) that you apply in one click, such as Heading 1 or Normal.

On a one-page flyer the difference hardly matters. On a 12-page handbook it matters a lot. If ten volunteers each make chapter titles "bold and big", you get ten slightly different headings, and Word has no idea any of them are headings at all.

The rule of thumb: use styles for anything that repeats (headings, body text, notes) and keep direct formatting for small one-off touches, such as bolding a single word for emphasis.

Four ways to apply styles

To apply a paragraph style, click anywhere in the paragraph. You don't need to select the text first. Then use whichever of these is fastest for you.

For the handbook, use this structure:

• Title for the cover title, Tutoring Club Handbook. Use it once.
• Heading 1 for each chapter: Welcome, Session rules, Volunteer guide, Subjects and materials, Schedule, Contacts.
• Heading 2 for sections inside a chapter, such as Before a session.
• Heading 3 for the rare sub-section under that, such as Reading support.
• Normal for all body text.

Don't skip levels. A Heading 3 directly under a Heading 1 confuses screen readers and makes the table of contents look odd. Go 1, 2, 3 in order.

Change a style once, update everywhere

Here is the real payoff. The club wants chapter titles in dark green to match its logo. Instead of recoloring six headings by hand, you change the Heading 1 style itself.

1. In Home› then Styles, right-click Heading 1 and choose Modify.
2. In the Modify Style box, change the font, size or color with the quick buttons. For more, click Format at the bottom left and choose Font, Paragraph, Border or others.
3. Leave Only in this document selected, so you don't change Heading 1 for every new document you create.
4. Click OK. Every Heading 1 in the handbook changes at once.

There is a second way that feels more natural to many people: format one heading by hand until it looks right, keep the cursor in it, then right-click Heading 1 in the gallery and choose Update Heading 1 to Match Selection. Word copies that look into the style and every other Heading 1 follows.

Restyle the whole document with Style Sets and themes

Sometimes you don't want to tweak one style; you want a different overall look. The Design tab changes all styles together.

• Style Sets (the gallery in the middle) change the look of Title, headings and Normal together: fonts, sizes, spacing and borders.
• Colors swaps the theme colors. Headings use theme colors, so they all change.
• Fonts swaps the theme font pair: one font for headings and one for body text.
• Paragraph Spacing sets spacing and line spacing for the whole document in one go.

This only works on text that uses styles and theme settings. In the Font list on the Home tab, the two fonts at the top, marked Headings and Body, are the theme fonts. If a volunteer picked Georgia by hand, that paragraph ignores the theme and stays Georgia. That is another reason to remove direct formatting before you restyle.

Move around with the Navigation Pane

Once your headings use styles, the Navigation Pane becomes a live outline of the handbook. Turn it on with View› then Show› then Navigation Pane, or press Ctrl+F and click the Headings tab at the top of the pane.

The club decided families should read Schedule before Volunteer guide. Without styles, you would cut two pages of text and paste them carefully in the right spot. With the Navigation Pane, you drag Schedule above Volunteer guide and you're done. If you numbered your headings by hand ("3. Volunteer guide"), remember to fix the numbers afterwards.

Collapsing works in the page too: hover over any heading and a small triangle appears to its left. Click it to hide everything under that heading while you work on another chapter. Right-click a heading and use Expand/Collapse to open or close all of them.

Diagnose formatting that looks wrong

Sometimes a heading looks right but doesn't show in the Navigation Pane, or one paragraph refuses to match the others. Word can tell you exactly why.

• Styles pane. Open it (Alt+Ctrl+Shift+S) and click in the paragraph. The style it uses is highlighted. If a "heading" shows Normal, it was faked.
• Style Inspector. At the bottom of the Styles pane, click the Style Inspector button. It shows the paragraph style and, separately, any direct formatting added on top. Use its eraser buttons to remove the extra formatting.
• Reveal Formatting. Press Shift+F1 to open a pane that lists every font, paragraph and section setting for the selected text, with links to change each one.

To strip direct formatting and let the style show through, select the text and press Ctrl+Space (removes character formatting such as bold and font size) or Ctrl+Q (removes paragraph formatting such as indents and spacing). The style stays; only the hand-made extras go.

Common mistakes

Practice